Halo: Return of the Forerunners
by grey280
Summary: What happens when the Forerunners return? R&R. Being worked on again...
1. Chapter 1

HALO: Return of the Forerunners

Part One:

Discovery

Chapter One:

Discovery

**Sorry that the 'part one' and 'chapter one' have the same title, but I am bad at thinking up titles. I am best at writing the actual story. If I every get a novel published, I will let the editor think up a name for it.**

**Anyway, I got the idea for this right after reading HALO: Contact Harvest, so if a lot of it seems the same, let me just say that my writing is greatly influenced by what I have read recently.**

\ CONNECTING TO FLEETCOM NOW.. \

\ CONNECTION ESTABLISHED. \

\ PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE \

\ PASSWORD \

\ ACCEPTED.\

\ LOADING FLEETCOM DATA \

\ LOCATION CONFIRM: EPSILON ERIDANI I \

confirmed

\ ALL UNITS ON EPSILON ERIDANI I ARE ORDERED TO LOCATE A METEORITE THAT FELL IN A QUADRANT, SECTOR FOUR. THIS IS A TOP-PRIORITY MISSION \

Can you get the word out to all the units?

\ YES \

\ WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO DO SO? \

yes

\ COMPLYING... \

\ DISCONNECTING FROM FLEETCOM... \

"New orders from FLEETCOM. They say we gotta look for some kinda meteor-thingie. Probly hopin' it's an alien spaceship we can steal."

"Yeah! Stealin' alien spaceships!"

"Shaddup Paul!"

"Yes sir. Being quiet sir."

It was quiet for a while after that. Then the five men stood up. brushed off their UNSC Naval Warfare fatigues, and began walking in what appeared to (and was) a random direction.

Minutes after they began walking, they came upon something strange.

A burnt trail through the tall, thin grass of Epsilon Eridani I.

One of the men spoke into a FLEETCOM mic in his helmet. "I think we found their 'meteor', here." An unintelligible crackle was the only reply. "Dang, must be broken. How would... could be jammed, I suppose." When he said this, all of the men looked up at the sky fearfully. The best soldiers in the galaxy could do nothing to the Covenant ships in orbit.

The men pulled out their guns and began walking towards what appeared to be the meteor. However, they were stopped by the strange sight of a boy and his dog,a species that cost millions of dollars to import to Epsilon Eridani.

"Hey kid," one growled impatiently, "shouldn't you be on one of the evac ships? You're in our way. Move." The soldier obviously expected the child to follow his orders immediately, but the child just looked at him uncomprehendingly. Hearing the tone in his voice, the dog moved in front of the boy, growling, hackles raised.

"Ha ha! Look! 'Spot' is going to go all 'guard dog' on us!" laughed one. The first man, his tone even more dangerous than before, pointed near the boys feet with his gun. "Guard this!" he cried, then started firing.

Surprising the men, the bullets ricochet away from him, off of a golden energy shield that had sprung from a Forerunner Sentinel floating next to the boy. The shield vanished, and an orange glow began to collect around the front of the Sentinel. After a moment, an orange laser shot out and melted the front of the man's gun. A darker orange glow began to form, but the boy moved in front of the robot, and began speaking in a strange language.

"We may need some assistance here," the man sad into his microphone, seeing that the connected icon was flashing next to the FLEETCOM status indicator.

"We have some units in the area. Redirecting now."

"Wait!" he tried to say, but the connection had already been lost to a wave of static.

The men were standing in a circle around the boy when a pelican dropship roared into view, quickly moving to where they were. The soldiers were surprised when a spartan dropped out of it.

On their HUDs his name came up: SPARTAN-117, Master Chief.

"Master Chief sir!" They saluted.

"At ease," he replied.

Another voice came from the MJOLNIR's speakers. It was a women's voice.

"Why were we called here?"

"Oh yeah..." the man in charge muttered. "We called you about... that." he gestured towards the child, who was sitting there, petting his dog.

"What, he didn't want to leave his home?" Cortana's voice was mocking. The man's reply was to pull out an SMG and fire a few rounds near the boy. The sentinel's shield appeared around him, followed by the sentinel itself.

"Why is a Sentinel on a planet that has no trace of Forerunners? Could it have been in that meteor?"

The boy was hanging onto the sentinel now, about a foot off of the ground. One of the men uneasily raised his gun. The golden energy shield reappeared.

"That is odd... Before, the energy shields only came up when they were under-"

The needler rounds bounced off of the shield and lodged themselves in the ground near Master Chief's foot. He jumped away, and they exploded. A single grunt ran screaming out from behind what appeared to be a modified energy shield that had been turned into a stealth unit. It was gunned down by the men, who began to walk towards it.

"Stay back!" Cortana's warning came just in time, as the hidden plasma grenade the grunt had exploded. Master Chief threw a grenade into the spot the grunt had come out of, and was rewarded by the screams of jackals and grunts. There was a flash and a muffled boom, and a 'room' about the size of the Pelican dropship hovering overhead appeared.

"That's new. I should probably report this. Hang on... Okay, I uploaded it to FLEETCOM for the ONI spooks to look at. Now for that kid..." Cortana murmured.

Master Chief walked over towards the child. He looked up at the child, who had climbed on top of the sentinel, which appeared to be having trouble staying in the air with this added weight.

"Hello," Cortana said, through the MJOLNIR armor's speakers. The boy replied with what sounded like gibberish to Master Chief. Well, all but one part. He remembered it from when he was being trained for the new Covenant threat.

_It was sweltering in the briefing room, as John was out of his MJOLNIR armor so that they could all fit in the room. There was an A.I. at the front, projected from a ceiling-mounted holotank. The lights dimmed and the windows polarized with a crack that was probably heard only by the spartans in the room. A screen behind the A.I. came on, and began showing footage from Harvest._

_After the briefing, he was told to report to Special Briefing Room 2. It took him a minute to find it, in a side hallway and down a flight of stairs. When he got there, he saw Dr. Halsey in the room, standing at the podium. As he sat down the lights in this room dimmed down to allow an A.I. using a holotank on low power to become visible. The A.I.'s avatar, an artificially reconstructed actress from around 2015, disappeared, to be replaced by a sonic frequency readout._

_"You need to know this, before you go. We have found traces of another race, before us and this 'Covenant'. We are calling them the Forerunners. We think they might have stopped on Earth at some point, as the 'Covenant' appear to know... well, listen to this," said Dr. Halsey, and tapped a button on her PDA-like device. A sound bite played. John could tell that it was spoken by a 'grunt', but it was an Earth language-Latin. The earliest known language. _**If that is incorrect, deal with it. (I am so mean sometimes!)**

The boy now spoke the same words that grunt had, recorded during the first contact with an alien race.

"Non sequiter," he said, sounding unsure of himself. Cortana took this as an opening and began to speak in Latin, having the language stored in her memory banks since the day she was created.

**I don't know how to speak/write Latin, although I intend to learn, but for now I will just show it translated.**

"Where are you from?"

"I don't know."

"You don't?"

"ARF! ARF!" The dog was hopping up in the air, clearly agitated by something. Then it jumped on the Master Chief.

It surprised all of them when he fell over backwards, propelled by the little dog. This was evidenced by the men shouting things along the lines of "What the --!?" and Cortana saying "How?" then continued muttering to herself.

The boy clearly did not like his dog doing this, and grabbed it around the stomach, trying to pull it off of the Master Chief. He shouted something at it in a language that sounded vaguely like Latin. He fell over backwards as the dog let go of the Spartan-II.

"Okay, everybody in the dropship! Now now now!" This came from external speakers on the dropship above. "Just got word from FLEETCOM, the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet! Move!" The soldiers all climbed into the pelican, but the boy ran the other way. His dog, and the Master Chief, followed.

He stopped at a part of the ground that was slightly raised, then jumped on it. Or rather, into it, for as he touched the top of it he did not stop. He just continued right through. The dog, barking madly, jumped right in after him. Master Chief heard a few barks, some scolding in that Latin-like language, and then what sounded like the machinery of the Halo construct as it started.

The ground rippled, distorted, then the raised section vanished, to show a large crater in the ground, with a pod-like device in the center, larger than the Master Chief. It began to levitate, turned towards the boy who was standing next to him, and waited, managing to look like an excited puppy in the process.

The Master Chief ran down the side of the crater, grabbed the boy, and began running towards the pelican, as the first plasma bombardment hit the north and south poles of the planet. The pod turned and began levitating towards them, quickly catching up.

As the Spartan, with the boy slung over his shoulder climbed into the Pelican, it took off, just in time to avoid the first shock waves and flooding from the melting and exploding poles.

Out of the dust clouds, the pod appeared, and accelerated towards the dropship.

As they burst out of the clouds of dust covering the entire planet, they saw an exploding Covenant battle cruiser, surrounded by four UNSC ships. Another ship came up behind them, and fired its energy projector at them, slicing through two of the ships. The other two turned on it and fired their MAC guns and Archer missiles. The ship's shields flared and vanished when the MAC salvo hit them, and it exploded from the Archer missiles.

The pelican's engines stuttered, seemed to fail for a minute, then came back on with a blast of flame. They flew towards the _Inner Sanctum._ **(I made that up. It is basically the same as the **_**Pillar of Autumn**_**, but not... blown up. And it has been souped up by the ONI spooks for use as a surveillance station.) **

The pelican flew into the _Inner Sanctum_'s launch bay, and as air was pumped into the now-sealed room,they could hear the ship's Shaw-Fujikawa Translight engine charging. They heard a thump from the outside of the launch bay.

"Slipspace jump in 30...25...20...15... Just stay in the dropship for now, it will shield us from any side affects. 3,2,1, jump!" The ship shuddered, and a ripple went through it.

"We are now in slipspace. You are free to move about the vessel."

They climbed out of the dropship and walked through the corridors of the ship towards their assigned quarters. The boy's room was more of a cell, as one wall was a two-way mirror (albeit not mirrored), and the door had no way to open it from the inside.

"I will be in charge of trying to teach him English, or learn his language." Cortana said.

"Alert! All personnel, battle stations! Incoming target! Warning!" It was the ship's A.I., Ether.

\ INITIATING AI-AI DATA TRANSFER \

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL INITIATED \

CORTANA Can I see the contact?

ETHER

\ DATA TRANSFER INITIATED \

\ PASSWORD? \

CORTANA

\ ACCEPTED \

CORTANA I think I know what it is.

CORTANA

\ DATA TRANSFER INITIATED \

ETHER It appears to be the same. External cameras coming online...

ETHER Match. Should I take any action?

CORTANA Open the launch bay doors.

ETHER Complying...

ETHER Okay.

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL DISENGAGED \

\ AI-AI DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ TRANSCRIPT SAVED \

"All personnel, stand down. Contact is non-Covenant, repeat, contact is non-Covenant."

The launch bay doors shut again, and the external doors opened to admit the pod, which apparently had Slipspace capacity. It was cycled into the ship, and six men carried it down into a secure storage bay that was originally for the transfer of illegal weaponry that may have had AI capability.

Once everybody was sure that the unit was secure, and the strange boy, too, they locked them in, and Cortana began to simultaneously examine the pod and attempt to confer with the strange boy. On an unused screen in the ship's command center, diagrams began to flash past, and comparisons of the molecular construction of different types of constructs were being processed on the next screen. A match came up. It said: DELTA HALO CORE SAMPLE--DIGITAL COPY ONLY AVAILABLE

End Chapter One

**So what does everybody think? This is my first Halo fanfic, so no flames, although constructive criticism would be accepted.**

**R&R!**

**I will try to update this within the next month. Summer break at last!**


	2. Chapter 2

HALO: Return of the Forerunners

Part One:

Discovery

Chapter Two:

Shield World

LOCATION:

SLIPSTREAM SPACE

APPROXIMATE LOCALE:

ONYX SYSTEM

UNSC CONTROLLED SPACE

ONI DATA:

This area is illegal to enter. Dangerous magnetic fields interfere with ships systems.

AREA DATA:

ACCESS DENIED

--NO ENTRY--

**I like to start these chapters with computer entries, and I will probably continue doing so. Oh, by the way,**

**YAAY! Second chapter!**

**I hope people like this!**

**R&R**

**BTW, did anyone realize what those little thingies meant? It was a reference to how when you are typing, that little bar spawns the words, and if you stop it starts blinking.**

**Okay, on to the story!**

Last time:

**One more thing, I might continue doing that, when it is important to the storyline.**

On an unused screen in the ship's command center, diagrams began to flash past, and comparisons of the molecular construction of different types of constructs were being processed on the next screen. A match came up. It said: DELTA HALO CORE SAMPLE--DIGITAL COPY ONLY AVAILABLE

**Insert them song here.**

**Actually, please don't, it would mess up the way you read it.**

**Forget I said anything, OK?**

"Chief." Master Chief continued training, acknowledging Cortana with a grunt.

"I will take that to mean that you are listening. I have been running scans on that weird pod we found, or, more accurately, the boy found, and I came up with a match on the 

molecular scale. It was created by Forerunners, or at least Forerunner metals. See?" A complex model came up, showing two different samples, and lines linked the similarities in them in red, black for differences.

"The only differences were caused by aging... which occurred on the Halo sample."

Master Chief stopped beating the stuffing out of a reinforced punching bag and began to listen with some interest.

"What about the kid? Learn anything from him?" he asked.

"Well, I have begun to teach him English, but mostly I am trying to learn his version of Latin. It seems to be even older than the Latin we know!"

"What?" The Chief exclaimed.

"Hard to believe, isn't it... Right now, I am letting him use the computer for controlling the door to look at our location. Wait... What?" she looked distracted. "Chief, I need you down there. I can't figure out what he wants!" Her avatar disappeared from his HUD.

Master Chief walked out of the gym and towards the cell they had the boy in.

"Behind... the sharp- sharp- sharpened edge of the shield." The boy said it slowly, then repeated it, faster this time. "Behind the sharpened edge of the shield." He continued this until Master Chief walked into the room.

One of the walls of the room had reinforced glass 'windows' that were simply screens behind bulletproof glass. The boy was standing on a bench mounted on that wall to put his chin on the 'windowsill', still repeating his 'behind the sharpened edge of the shield' mantra.

"Okay, kid, what do you mean by that?" Master Chief asked bluntly. The boy looked quizzically at him, then turned towards the portable holotank that had been mounted to the floor, asking Cortana something in Latin.

**Just to be clearer, I am going to call his Latin dialect Forerunner Latin. OK? If you have complaints... deal with it. Who saw that coming?**

She replied in kind. "I though you were going to teach him English?" Master Chief said. "Maybe you should. That would be easier for all of us."

"Maybe for you," she retorted, "but were you aware that English is the hardest human language to learn? It would be hard for him to-" She was cut off by the boy walking over and saying, in clear but not grammatically correct English, "Spartan." He pointed at Master Chief." He turned towards the windows, which were displaying the Onyx system, and pointed at Onyx. "Shield. Spartans there."

"What?"

He repeated the same thing. "Spartans there. On shield. We go... we go shield. I get Spartans. Yes?" he asked the Master Chief, looking up at him with wide, silver eyes. "You Spartan. You miss Spartans? I get more." Now he sounded like a child trying to convince his parents to buy him a new toy.

Master Chief looked at Cortana. "Should we?" He asked. "Oh, why not," she said, sounding tired. "Hang on. I will try to talk Ether into it. And the captain.

\ INITIATING AI-AI DATA TRANSFER \

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL INITIATED \

CORTANA Ether.

ETHER Yes?

CORTANA I MAY have found some Spartans.

ETHER Really?

CORTANA Would I lie to you?

ETHER . . .

CORTANA Uh... Well, differences aside, it is your mission to take care of the Spartan-IIs, is it not?

ETHER Well... Yes.

CORTANA Then you are obliged to find and recover them if you can.

ETHER I suppose you are correct. Well...

CORTANA ?

ETHER Where do I have to go?

CORTANA Thank you, Ether.

ETHER Just tell me before I change my mind.

CORTANA Onyx. Not too far, is it?

ETHER As if you don't know. Changing course...

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL DISENGAGED \

\ AI-AI DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ TRANSCRIPT SAVED \

"Stand by to exit slipspace, Chief."

"Good job, Cortana. That took all of three milliseconds."

"Milliseconds," said the boy, surprising them both. They looked at him. "Milliseconds," he said again, then was silent.

The ship shuddered, and the windows flickered and went blank. A ripple ran through the ship, and the windows came back on again, with a slightly different version of what was showing before.

Onyx was surrounded by rings made of destroyed ships, both Covenant and UNSC. The planet itself, was another story.

Onyx was... gone. Replaced by billions of sentinels. All of which were turning to face the _Inner Sanctum_. And charging laser blasts. An alarm began to scream a warning to the crew of the ship.

Deep within the hold of the _Inner Sanctum_, in a locked and armored room, an automatic system came to life. It beamed out a few high-speed communications, then shut back down.

Outside, the sentinels let the energy run out of their canons, then turned back to patrolling the planet.

In the _Inner Sanctum_'s command center, it was chaotic.

"What just happened?" the captain yelled, and a lieutenant ran up to him.

"Sir, we were about to be destroyed by... uh..." he glanced at his PDA, then looked back up at the captain. "Approximately fourteen billion Forerunner sentinels, then they just... stopped." His PDA beeped. He looked down at it. "Unauthorized transmission from the..." he squinted at it, then looked at the captain again. "From the strong box, sir." The captain frowned.

"All that is in there is that... oh." "What sir?" "That Forerunner artifact we retrieved from Epsilon Eridani I. Must have told 'em to 'stand down'." He laughed. "Thank heaven we brought that thing on board! Otherwise, we would be a footnote in the ONI books!" He laughed again, then tapped in some commands. "Ether, you are in charge of running the ship. Give Cortana control of one of the dropships and some soldiers. And when it leaves, follow it. Stay as close as possible. Got it?" "Yes, sir."

"Chief, I have been granted some men, and a dropship. You want to come with me?" "Why do you even need to ask? Are you my CO now?" "Temporarily."

"Temporarily. Tem-poh-rare-ih-ly." "Cortana, do you know his name yet?" "Umm... No Chief. Sorry. I'll keep working with him on the way down to the planet." "Fine."

By now they had reached the room with the pod in it. Master Chief reached out to grab it. Then the little dog popped out, and began barking furiously at him. Remembering what happened with that little dog last time, Master Chief decided not to grab the pod. The boy hopped in it, but when the spartan tried to see what he was doing, the dog growled menacingly. "Jeez Chief, you sure are scared of that little dog," Cortana teased. "Little dog that can knock me over in the MJOLNIR armor. That thing must weigh sixteen tons! Even though that is not possible..."

The boy popped back out. He was wearing what looked like a backpack, and holding a flat device that looked like a PDA. "We go now," he said, sounding impatient.

Cortana flickered and froze for a moment. "Sorry, just giving an update on the info. They were going to follow us in all the way, to keep the protection that little pod is apparently giving us. Since we are leaving it here, I told them not to." "Oh," said Master Chief, sounding somewhat understanding.

"Update. We go now?" the boy asked. "Hey, you are getting better at English fast, kid."

They were now in the launch bay of the _Inner Sanctum_. Ten soldiers were already on board the pelican, waiting for them. One of them looked out of the open rear compartment, and, apparently uninformed, stated that "I didn't know we had any kids on board." He turned towards one of the other men with an accusing glare, then seemed to realize how stupid he was being. "Oh... Uh, did we pick up stragglers from Epsilon Eridani I? Jeez, they didn't even have enough time to name it before the Covenant (I censor my writing due to a personal taboo) blew it up. Huh." Cortana snorted with suppressed laughter, and even Master Chief laughed when the boy walked up to the soldier, took his gun, and began to 

examine it in a comical way. "I don't suppose you taught him that, Cortana?" "I wish I had!" she replied.

After a moment of laughing at the bewilderment on the soldiers face as the boy handed his gun back to him in fifteen pieces, Master Chief walked into the pelican and told the man how to reassemble his gun.

"Liftoff in two minutes, Chief." "Thanks for the update, Cortana," he replied. He spent the time making sure the boy knew how to hold onto the spots in the wall so that he would not fall in the planet's gravity, and other things of the sort.

"Strap yourselves in, we're going for a ride!" Cortana shouted over the MJOLNIR armor's external speakers. The pelican's engines started up with a roar, and it lifted off from the deck. It spun, and flew out into space. The engine noise instantly went quiet as the air ran out. Inside the vehicle, the sounds were still audible, but quieted, as they had to vibrate through the metal hull before spreading into the air inside the craft. A light flashed on the mission update monitor, stating that the rocket fuel will run out in one hour. Fortunately, they were only twenty minutes from the planet, so they had plenty of fuel for a round trip.

The boy wrestled with his backpack for a moment, then pulled out a baseball-sized object. He tapped it, then seemed confused when nothing happened. He glared at it for a moment, then reached into his backpack again and pulled out a cable that was attached to something inside the backpack. He plugged it into the orb. Well, if you can call it that. The cord simply stuck to the surface of the orb. Cortana examined the orb. It looked like glass on the outside, but on the inside it looked like a dark space filled with purple clouds. She could barely see the cord on the other side of it. It flashed, and the cord began to glow slightly. Inside the clouds of purple, clusters of green ones and zeros appeared and swirled around inside.

"Is that a... computer?" she asked over the MJOLNIR's external speakers. He looked up at her, or rather, Master Chief. "Computer?" he said. She then spoke in Forerunner Latin for a moment. "Oh," he said, then, "yes." He pointed at he orb. "Computer."

He tapped it again. Cortana watched it closely. This time, she saw a light blue, slightly glowing, square object appear inside, then fly outwards toward the boy. It appeared as a holographic window in front of him. He set the orb down on his backpack, then began tapping commands into the holographic control panel. On-screen, another alert came up. Cortana switched to the pelican's internal cameras, then accessed the system log.

/ CONNECTING TO FLEETCOM /

/ CONNECTION ESTABLISHED /

ALERT!

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS!

CONFIRM ACCESS?

CORTANA Internal access map?

/ LOADING... /

A map appeared in 'front' of Cortana. It showed where the wireless activity was coming from. She checked with the map and then checked with the internal cameras.

CORTANA Access confirmed.

PASSWORD?

CORTANA

CONFIRMED

FLEETCOM ACCESS...

GRANTED

The boy was accessing FLEETCOM. "What are you doing?" Cortana asked him, back in the MJOLNIR system. "Find... Data..." He looked at the 'screen'. "FLEET... COM." Master Chief started to ask something, but then the intercom came on.

"Landing in thirty. Sorry, would've given you more warning but I was... distracted. Thousands of the alien floating (censorship)!" The intercom clicked back off again. The pelican began to shake as it entered Onyx's atmosphere.

"Everybody ready to move?" Cortana called. "We need to be out of here fast and furious. No shooting unless I say so, and protect that kid!" "Ma'am yes ma'am!" they called.

With a thump, the ship landed on Onyx's surface. The door opened and the soldiers poured out of the ship, followed by Master Chief and the boy. A group of Sentinels flew up.

"Welcome, Reclaimer. The Shield World has been activated. Please leave," it said. Master Chief was standing between them and the boy. The Sentinels seemed to recoil away from him, then said, "welcome, Creator." Master Chief was confused until he realized that the boy had come out from behind him.

The boy spoke to the Sentinels for a moment in Forerunner Latin. One of them responded in the same language, then they all floated away. The boy turned towards Master Chief and began speaking in Forerunner Latin. He listened, as Cortana apparently did, too, because she replied in the same language. Then she spoke to the Chief. "He just got us the coordinates of the nearest Forerunner teleport pad, or system access point that he can use. I am marking it as a NAV point now. Same goes for the soldiers. Lets go!"

They set off at a quick pace towards the NAV marker that Cortana had set. It took nearly two hours to get to the NAV point. Once they got there, they saw it was an ancient Forerunner city. The boy immediately ran towards one of the buildings. Master Chief took off at a run after him.

The boy reached a building that appeared to have been bombed. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a strange metal object, unfolded it, and jumped. His jump took 

him about a foot off of the ground. Then the device began to glow at the ends of the odd tube-shaped parts, ad he flew further into the air.

Master Chief reached that point, looked up, and cursed. Then he punched the wall. This was not in anger, as the soldiers suspected, but for a greater purpose. With his enhanced strength, plus the bonus of the MJOLNIR armor, he made a large dent in the wall. Then he reached higher up, and punched it again. He reached farther up, another punch. Farther up, punch again. After repeating this pattern for another few punches, then stopped. He then used these dents and cracks in the strange stone/metal hybrid to climb up. Once inside, he saw the boy standing in the middle of a swarm of holographic symbols. He was tapping some, and looking a bit confused and mad. He repeatedly tapped one symbol, then looked up when he heard one of the soldiers cursing as he tried to climb up the wall like Master Chief had.

"Broke," he said, gesturing at the teleport pad. "How?" asked Cortana. He gestured, trying to explain something, then seemed to have an idea. He tapped some symbols, and a map of the planet appeared in 3-D. He twisted a symbol, and the view changed. It showed a series of explosions shrinking to the inside of the planet. He twisted more controls, and the view swept through the planets surface, and into the core room. It showed the shrinking tower/structure at the center of the planet. It showed Kurt making a final stand, and it showed him tap a key on his Semi Powered Infiltration armor's control unit. And it showed the nuclear warheads detonating.

"Oh!" said Cortana. "The system was destabilized by a thermonuclear detonation. Now he can't get us to the core room, and even if we could get there, the systems for creating the portal into the place that the Spartans went was destroyed by the explosion. Hmm..."

The boy spoke in Forerunner Latin. Cortana paused, and Master Chief cold feel her thinking. Then she replied. "Oh," said the boy. Then he turned to Master Chief. "Have... Translight... engine?" he asked haltingly. "Uh... Yes, we have one on the _Inner Sanctum_. Why?" "I... get... translight engine, I get... Spartans." Master Chief spoke privately to 

Cortana. "Just how fast is he learning English?" he asked. "As far as I can tell, the first time he hears a word, he learns it, and by the second time he says it he knows what it means and can use it easily. That is... probably about four hundred percent of the regular human language learning rate." "Wow..." Master Chief spoke softly.

"Why does he need a translight drive?" Cortana spoke to the boy in Forerunner Latin. He replied. Cortana translated for him. "If he gets a translight drive, he will be able to rewire some of it to open a direct portal to the Spartans in the planet's core." "Do we have an extra translight drive or him to use?" "Actually, yes. The _Inner Sanctum_ was being tested for high speed slipspace travel, and has two translight drives for that purpose. I will see if we can get it down here." Cortana was silent for a while, and Master Chief saw his shield meter begin to drain as more power was used to power the long-range COM unit. Then it began to recharge.

"Well?" Master Chief asked impatiently. He had been separated from his family for too long. "Yes. They are bringing it in on the dropship, along with extra fuel. The added weight means it will need the fuel. Give it twenty five-odd minutes." "Okay, but where is it going to get power?" "I figured he could tap into the planet's systems." "Okay."

Twenty-seven minutes later, Master Chief was helping the soldiers unload a Shaw-Fujikawa Faster-Than-Light Drive from the pelican. The boy was already examining the parts of the machine that had been unloaded.

"Hmm…" he said, and then plugged in a cable that some of the _Inner Sanctum_'s techies had said he would need. The computer that it was hooked into beeped, then began to make a whirring noise. He ran over to it and began typing.

"Uh… can he understand that computer?" Master Chief asked Cortana. "I think… no." she replied, sounding a bit confused. "So how is he- oh…" Cortana had seen the boy's little orb-computer hooked into the laser communications link on the human-made computer. It had taken over the unit, and on the screen Forerunner symbols were flashing past.

The translight drive now assembled, the soldiers were taking a break. One of them was looking at the boy's flight gear that had allowed him to jump up into the building. "It uses the same type of anti-grav unit in the Sentinels we have tried to reverse-engineer." Cortana was now speaking with him using 

the COM unit. "It IS the same type of tech. We think he may be a Forerunner." "What?!" the man exclaimed. The boy looked up at him, then looked back at his work. Cortana and the soldier were deep in conversation about Forerunner technologies.

The translight engine started with a strange sound that sounded like a banshee's wail (not the Covenant vehicle type, the ghost-like creature type). Everybody jumped, then Master Chief ran over to the boy, who was standing next to the computer. "Is it ready?" he asked. Cortana made a noise that sounded like a sigh. "If it is starting, I would guess that it is ready, Chief."

The boy tapped some more commands into the console, then reached over and tapped a floating holographic dot. It quickly grew to be a 40-inch-by-20-inch panel, displaying readouts of information about various things. Master Chief saw a power level indicator that looked like a pie chart, and was surprised to realize that it was in fact a detailed map of the planet. Some of the other readouts were advanced maps of slipspace, and the surrounding area.

"Chief? Uh, you may want to mention that the Covenant are bad guys." Master Chief was about to ask why, then he saw the four Covenant battle cruisers that were shown on the map. The _Inner Sanctum_ was in the process of 'ghosting', going into stealth mode.

"Hey, kid? Those new ships, they are bad. Can you turn on some defensive protocols or something?" The boy turned towards him. "Yes," he said, then tapped an icon and tapped the four Covenant ships.

On the map, a swarm of Sentinels flew outwards towards each of the ships. The four Covenant ships bunched together, then fired pulse lasers and plasma cannons. One fired an energy projector at the swarm.

The Shaw-Fujikawa unit began generating a different noise, and began to shake a bit.

The Covenant attacks hit the swarm of Sentinels. Thousands of them put up shields. The shields flared, overloaded, and vanished. The Sentinels were turned to slag.

Behind the ships, a massive slipspace portal opened, and thousands of Sentinels began to fly out. Light began to collect around them, and they fired.

The Covenant ships turned, and tried to do a short-range jump out of the way. It failed. Shields flared, and began to fail. On the ships, machinery began to explode. The plasma coil in the ship closest to the Sentinel formation overloaded. The ship exploded. The others were not far behind.

The Sentinels turned towards Onyx and began to fly back towards it.

The translight drive went back to the first sound it had made, and the soldiers covered their ears. The machine shuddered, the holographic panel flickered, and for a moment the soft light that had been coming out of differently-colored parts of the structure went out. Master Chief's HUD flickered madly, and he could see the other soldiers HUDs doing the same.

Then the portal opened. Another holographic window opened, showing the inside of the planet, where the Spartan-IIIs, Dr. Halsey, and the rest of the people who had gone into the planet's core looking at the portal in confusion. It also had a countdown timer. 10:00 it said. The boy shouted something, but it was inaudible over the roar of the translight drive. Master Chief stuck his head into the portal, then the entire top half of his body.

On the monitor, they could see him gesturing to the people inside. 9:23. They began to move towards the portal. 8:43. Spartan-117 fell backwards out of the portal, pulling a large, hovering pod. 3:21. The last pod was out of the core of the planet, and the people followed. 0:15. The last person, Chief Petty Officer Mendez, fell out of the portal. 0:09. The portal began to shrink. 0:00. The portal closed with a whooshing sound, and the translight drive shut down. On the monitor, the planet's power level was reaching the danger zone, and a red alert was flashing.

Cortana looked at the monitor of the human-made terminal. It was being used for data transfer of some kind, and appeared to be downloading the amount of data in the entire FLEETCOM system every three point nine seconds. The planet's power level was draining, and outside, the Sentinels were settling to the surface to try to give the planet enough power to recover.

The boy tapped something on his control panel, and grabbed the computer. He threw his backpack over his shoulder, and began to run out of the building, towards the pelican, still tapping commands into his orb-computer. The soldiers exchanged looks and ran after him. The people they had just rescued followed suit.

Master Chief quickly caught up with the boy, right before the drop-off, and grabbed him, then jumped off the edge and ran to the pelican. Once the rest of the group was onboard, the boy ran over to the intercom unit and pressed the call button. "GO! NOW!" he practically screamed into it. They began to lift off. "FAST!" he yelled. The pilot called back, "what about the drive?" "It explode!" he yelled back. That got the pilot's attention, and they began to move faster.

Back in the building, the Shaw-Fujikawa translight drive sat there vibrating and making a sonic hum sufficient to cause parts of the building around it begin to collapse.

They hadn't yet gotten out of Onyx's atmosphere when it exploded. It wasn't really an explosion; it was more of a wall of light tearing out of the building, reminiscent of what it looked like when the Covenant battle cruiser jumped to the second Halo from inside the city on Earth.

As it ripped the building it was in to pieces, the power meter still displayed on the boys hologram control panel began to refill.

They quickly reached the _Inner Sanctum_, and initiated a slipspace jump. As they warped out of the system, billions of Sentinels could be seen flying towards the aftermath of the explosion to begin repairs.

End Chapter Two

**Well, did everyone enjoy chapter two? I hope so!**

**R&R!**


	3. Chapter 3

Halo: Return of the Forerunners

Part One:

Discovery

Chapter Three:

New Weapons

**Yay! Chapter three!**

**Okay, on to the story.**

**R&R!**

/ FLEETCOM ACCESS GRANTED /

/ PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE /

/ CONNECTING TO EARTH PLANETCOM /

/ CONNECTION ESTABLISHED /

/ CONNECT TO? /

[ connect to ONI NAVSPECWAR 1 ]

/ CONNECTING TO ONI NAVSPECWAR 1 /

/ CONNECTION ESTABLISHED /

/ ENCRYPTION KEY? /

[ ****************************************** ]

/ ACCEPTED /

/ USERNAME AND PASSWORD? /

[ JKROWLING **a joke. BTW, I don't own any names. Except for my own. You know, the regular disclaimer stuff so I don't get sued.** / ********************************** ]

/ VERIFYING… /

/ ACCEPTED /

/ WELCOME /

[ download file 4136 ]

/ DOWNLOADING… /

/ COMPLETE /

[ disconnect from all units ]

/ DISCONNECTING /

/ TRANSCRIPT FLASHBLANKED /

/ ACCESS FILE? /

[ yes ]

/ LOADING /

/ PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE /

Data match: Located pod-like unit/HALO construct

More data unavailable.

/ FILE ENDS /

/ ? /

[ delete and purge ]

/ LOADING… /

/ SYSTEM PURGED /

* * * * * * * * *

"Cortana, report on that kid. Actually, can you ask him what his name is? Calling him 'kid' 'that kid' or 'the boy' is getting annoying."

"Well Chief, he is rapidly becoming fluent in English. Right now I am letting him access FLEETCOM for a bit, on a read-only basis. I will try to ask him about his name. Okay?"

"Okay Cortana. And, good job." "Thank you, Chief."

Master Chief disengaged his COM unit and went back to exercising. After a while, he decided to get a better workout and went into the changing rooms of the ship's gym. After about half an hour, he came back out, without his MJONIR armor. He spent the next three hours exercising. At the end of that time, he cleaned and oiled his armor, replaced the nuclear power plant (using the ship's old bomb diffuser robot), and practiced shooting in the VR range.

"Chief? Can you come down here? The kid wants to see you. He won't talk to me until you come down here and talk to him or something..." "Okay. I was getting bored." He set off at a quick pace. Even so, it took him nearly five minutes to work his way through the ship. He was back in his armor by now.

He was going to put in his access code into the door when the keypad disappeared from the touch screen and Cortana appeared instead. The door opened, and Cortana disappeared from the screen. She was back over by the holotank, which she had turned into a holo/touchscreen computer for the boy to use. He seemed mystified by the fact that his hand went through the controls.

"Uh… Hi." Master Chief said. He wasn't good with kids. Never knew what to say, he once told Cortana. The boy looked up. "Hi," he said. He spoke nearly like someone who had been born and raised in one of the many UNSC colonies, only a bit slowly, as if he was unsure of himself. His accent sounded foreign in some way. Master Chief turned to Cortana. "You weren't kidding when you said he was getting fluent." He turned back to the boy, only to find him not there. "Where-" he was cut off by the audible alarm on his shields going off.

He spun around, or tried to. His armor didn't respond. Cortana, hovering over the holotank, sighed. "Sorry Chief, he gets into all the electronics. It took me an hour to talk him out of reverse engineering the holotank and turning it into a… I think he was going to make a laser turret. I shut down your armor so you wouldn't hurt him. Or electrocute him. Hang on." Then she spoke in Forerunner Latin to the boy for a couple minutes.

Master Chief nervously eyed his shield gauge. It wasn't recharging. Then he felt the boy do something to his armor systems, and it began to recharge. Then the boy walked back in front of him. He felt his armor systems unlock. Then he spoke to the boy.

"Okay, just a few questions. One, what did you do to my armor? And two, what is your name?"

"One, I looked at the… the inside of it. Two, uh… I don't know how to… uh… say it."

Master Chief turned towards Cortana. "Really fluent!"

He turned back to the boy. "Okay, first, you are getting good at English, so, uh… congratulations. Second, can you try to pronounce your name? At least in your language?"

"Uh…" the boy replied, then said "I think you would say it "!--UNTRANSLATABLE--!". That sounds about right."

**That originally had a name, but I'd just made it up on the spot. Hint so the next line makes sense: it had something along the lines of his nickname in it.**

"Well, uh… That is a… interesting name. How about we call you Kyle?" Master Chief asked.

"That would work," said Kyle. "Now, can I look at your armor? I want to see if I can upgrade it to at least Class 3 type armor. I think it is Class 2-ish. Can I?" Master Chief looked at him for a long time, and then replied. "343 Guilty Sparks, the crazy 'Monitor' of Delta Halo, said that I had Class 2 armor. If you can upgrade it without damaging it, I would be very thankful. Can you?"

Kyle thought for a while about that. "I think I can, and even if I can not I can easily recreate it. Would that be okay?" "Uh, yeah. Cortana, what do you say about this?" "I am not sure I approve of this, but if he can duplicate it… hmm… just to be safe, Kyle, I need you to make the duplicate first, and work on that. Another thing, no power plant in that until we reach Earth. Got it?"

"Okay. How long until we do reach Earth, anyway?" "Probably somewhere between three and five months."

Kyle seemed shocked by this. "Why so long?" he demanded. "Well, that is actually not a long time in comparison to how long some of the other ships take." "Not the ships I am used to. Those could travel that distance in only one or two months. They were even testing a ship that could travel across the entire galaxy in a week!" He blinked. "How do I know that?"

Master Chief walked out of the room, but before he closed the door he asked, "How long until that new armor is ready?" "If I can get the materials quickly, probably four days. I think."

* * * * * * * * *

Kyle was allowed out of his room now, and they had added controls on the inside of the door, but it still locked at night, and if anything important was happening outside. Cortana was still teaching him English, and he was nearly done with Master Chief's new armor. Now he opened the door and worked his way to one of the service corridors near the outside of the ship.

_I really prefer these outside corridors, because no one really uses them, except for the occasional tech. That means less hiding from people. I still can't figure out why they do not want people knowing I am on the ship. Wait, is that something- burning?_

Kyle looked at the wall. A red circle was burning itself into the dark metal. He pressed the alert button on his navy-issue bracelet (it had a tracer in it), then stuck his fingers into the crack between a badly hidden wall panel and the actual wall. He pried the panel open, then pressed the red button on his bracelet again and yelled "Covenant! Hull breach!" into it. He had found the microphone on it the day after they gave it to him.

With the panel open, he grabbed two fragmentation grenades, and a shotgun. He looked at the shotgun, then put it back and grabbed a pistol.

The metal panel popped off of the wall, and a little orb rolled out, surprising him. It began spraying gas ( standard knockout gas, stolen from a half-destroyed NavSpecWar freighter ship ), filling the corridor. He began coughing, then fell to the ground.

* * * * * * * * *

"Chief! Emergency!" Cortana had managed to make the internal speakers of the MJOLNIR armor system go into frequencies discovered during NavSpecWar's foray into sonic weaponry. He winced. "Sorry, but you need to-" she cut off, and Master Chief saw a flicker of red pass across her holographic body. A prerecorded message came on: "Warning. Automated internal defense mechanisms are active. Warning."

"Chief," Cortana said, "we are having some... problems. I need you to find Kyle. I will try to help you, but the tracer in his bracelet is getting some kind of interference..." Master Chief was already digging around in the weapon pack that was underneath his bunk. He pulled out an MA5B, four frag grenades, an assault rifle, and ammunition. As Cortana finished her last sentence, he was walking out the door, the MA5B stowed away, the assault rifle at ready. A NAV marker appeared on his HUD.

* * * * * * * * *

"No! No! Aack!" That was a Grunt. It'd just had it's skull crushed inward. Master Chief picked up two plasma grenades that it had dropped, briefly considered taking the plasma pistol from it, decided not to, and moved on.

The COM united crackled, then Cortana's voice came through. "Chief, I finally got a lock on the tracer signal... uploading the NAV marker now." Then the COM went silent. After a moment, there was a small chiming noise, and a NAV marker appeared on his HUD. Master Chief began to walk towards it.

* * * * * * * * *

It took him a while to find Kyle, and when he did, he had dropped the empty MA5K, picking up an Elite's plasma rifle instead.

He looked down at Kyle. "Oh no," he said, a tone of despair in his voice.

"What? What- oh..." Cortana fell silent as the video feed was sent to her in the _Inner Sanctum_'s command center.

Master Chief reached down and touched Kyle in the center of his chest, which had a blackened and charred hole in the middle of it.

"It looks like... it looks like he got shot with an overcharged plasma pistol..." Cortana said.

As Master Chief touched Kyles chest around the wound, his shields flared, and his hand was pushed away from Kyle's body. He saw an odd flashing light coming from around Kyle's shoulder.

"error...error...error..." said Cortana, sounding like the sort of voice that computers have in movies. "System reboot initialized. Friend or Foe tag number 447699084." The last part was broadcasted through the MJOLNIR armor's external speakers in Forerunner Latin.

Kyle flickered. Master Chief stared. Then Kyle began to distort like an LCD screen in 130 degree weather. And then the hole in the middle of his chest disappeared.

Kyle was lying on the ground, unconscious, surrounded by the golden glow of a recharging energy shield.

"Arf! Arf! Arf!" Kyle's little dog came roaring around the corner, ran past Master Chief, leaped in the air, and jumped off one of the protruding support columns. He hit Master Chief with an audible 'thwack', and bounced off to land next to Kyle. Master Chief, surprised by the little dog, and not expecting what happened, heard his armor's systems shriek in protest when he hit the wall at the end of the corridor.

Cortana took control of the external speakers on the armor and spoke again. "Friend or Foe tag number 447699084," again, in Forerunner Latin.

The little dog stopped growling, and regarded Master Chief, who was walking back towards him.

Master Chief stepped back in surprise when the dog spoke. "Friend or Foe tag number accepted. Code Sierra Orion Sierra. Repeat, code Sierra Orion Sierra. **I just made that up, as I cannot remember what the military code letter thing is for 'O'. If you don't know what that code means... reread it until you do. Please.**

"Wait a minute, WHAT?" he said, in an incredulous tone of voice.

"Hostile, non human-origin life forms have been terminated. Code Sierra Orion Sierra. Repeat, code Sierra Orion Sierra." Then the little dog flickered, and began to distort in the same way the Kyle had when Master Chief found him. After the process was complete, a miniature version of 343 Guilty Sparks was floating in front of him. Master Chief pulled out both the assault rifle and the plasma rifle, and took aim at the little robot.

"Chief! Stop!" said Cortana. "That robot- he is supposed to be Kyle's... uh, guardian, if I am translating correctly. He needs your help." The robot floated up to eye level and bobbed up and down in the air, as if agreeing with Cortana. "Fine," said Master Chief, "but I still don't like talking to any of those 'monitors'..."

A line of light began to swirl out of the robot's 'eye', followed by red, blue, and yellow. They swirled around the robot, and began to take a form.

After a moment, Master Chief found himself looking at what looked like Cortana, except the image used was the MJOLNIR armor system.

"Now, may we continue? We do not have much time." The AI sounded very impatient, but Master Chief heard concern in it's voice.

"Don't have much time for what?" demanded Cortana.

The hovering AI sighed. "I have accessed FLEETCOM and am uploading the data to your systems now."

"Acessing," said Cortana. Then, "oh."

* * * * * * * * *

\ INITIATING AI-AI DATA TRANSFER \

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL INITIATED \

CORTANA Immediate change of course!

ETHER Why?

CORTANA Orders coming from alien AI

\ WARNING: SECURITY BREACH \

\ ! \

\ ! \

Sn9XI39*|n,? ****************

\ ACCEPTED \

\ \

ETHER What was that?

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ That would be me.

CORTANA I was wondering how long it would take you to crack the security.

CORTANA Ether, have you ever spoken with a Forerunner AI?

ETHER Forerunner...

ETHER ?

\ DATA TRANSFER INITIATED \

\ DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE \

ETHER Oh.

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Now, will you please change the course of this ship?

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ If I did it by force I'm sure some of the humans on board would panic and attempt to stop me.

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ I do not wish to harm them.

ETHER Changing course now...

CORTANA Thank you, Ether.

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL DISENGAGED \

\ AI-AI DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ TRANSCRIPT SAVED \

* * * * * * * * *

Master Chief heard the engines change pitch as they began to turn. The hovering Forerunner AI moved a bit closer to Master Chief, then back over to Kyle.

The _Inner Sanctum's_ PA system came online. It was the voice of the ship's AI, Ether. "The ship is changing course." The message repeated twice, then was quiet.

Master Chief stood guard there as Cortana and the alien AI had a silent conversation. Cortana began giving him some information.

"Apparently the Covenant had somehow gotten their hands on a human-made knockout gas. This gas, while being, uh, mostly harmless to humans, can be potentially deadly to Forerunners. They had discovered this and created a cure. Unfortunately, since humans have no use for the cure, we have none on board. Fortunately, it was stored onboard all Forerunner ships and facilities."

"So we're going to one of the Halos?" asked Master Chief.

"Well, insofar as I can tell, no. I THINK we're headed for a Forerunner outpost station. If I'm right, it is actually a research facility of some kind, or R&D, as they would say in businesses. There should be some available there, and if there isn't we can-" "I can," interrupted the voice of the Forerunner AI. It had been listening in and, apparently, working on its voice simulation software. Now it had a deep, gravely sort of voice. "Yes, he can get the development part of the facility to create a bit of the cure." "And we might even get a bit of Forerunner tech for the guys at ONI!"

It took only two and a half hours to reach the Forerunner facility, but, to all the people who knew the reason for the change of course, it seemed much longer.

There was a clang, and then a hissing noise from the airlock. A screen above it showed graphs and other data. The data was changing at a rapid pace, but after a moment, it stopped. A bell rang and the monitor pronounced it 'CLEAR'. The door opened

Master Chief ran into the room with a plasma rifle in each hand, pointing in both directions, followed quickly by a group of marines. Last was the little Forerunner AI, a little laser coming out of it, carrying the still-unconscious Kyle.

There was a small chiming noise from Master Chief's armor, and the HUD systems of all of the marines. A NAV marker appeared. Master Chief led the marines in the direction it indicated.

A small Sentinel appeared. It appeared to be charging the laser. Master Chief drew his weapon-

The Forerunner AI had appeared in front of him, and the plasma bolt hit it instead of the Sentinel. A small shield flickered into place around it. It ignored Master Chief and turned to the Sentinel, which appeared to be trying to get a lock on one of the marines. The AI flared brightly, and the sentinel shutdown and fell to pieces in midair.

"ACCESS CODE ACCEPTED" said a loud computerized voice. One of the marines, a new recuit, jumped. "Sorry..." he muttered when the rest of them turned to stare at him.

"Ah-hem," said the small Forerunner AI. They turned back to it. It was floating ahead of them, carrying Kyle with a tractor beam of some sort. They hurried to follow it.

After working their way through the building for about ten minutes, they found what appeared to be some sort of control room overlooking a production center. The Forerunner AI gently set Kyle down and moved over to one of the control panels. It hovered there for a moment, and Master Chief could see that the AI and the panel were communicaing with small flashes of light. Then a part of the panel slid open and a little stand came out. The Forerunner AI settled in that.

One of the marines jumped (the new recruit again) when, with a loud whirring noise, some of the machinery below them came to life. After a few minutes, a small tube popped out of the machines.

Most of the machinery shut down, but a large half-sphere embedded in the ceiling began to glow. Then a laser came out of it to land on the item that had just been created. The tube slowly began to lift into the air, and then accelerated until it was about a foot below the half sphere. "Is that a... crane?" asked one of the marines. "'Cuz it looks like one."

The crane moved the tube over until Master Chief could reach through the open windows and grab it, which he did. Then the crane shut down. The little AI floated off of the stand and over towards Kyle. Then, using a tractor beam, it took the tube from Master Chief. They all watched as the tube lit up at one end with a few symbols. One of the symbols flashed from yellow to green, and then all of the symbols disappeared. The top of the tube slid off smoothly.

They all sat still, watching as the Forerunner AI somehow got a small amount of the fog-like substance inside the tube to move over by Kyle. The AI continued to move the fog closer to Kyle until he inhaled it.

**Imagine the weird lightning-fog stuff that was in the mining facility in the first Arbiter level of Halo 2.**

After a moment, Kyle coughed. Then he coughed again, and he slowly opened his eyes.

"Where are we?" he asked as soon as he was able. Immediately after, he coughed again, and again. He rubbed his eyes. "What-" he coughed violently. "What happened? All I remember is the-" this time he was cut of by a long bout of coughing. The AI moved over by the tube and pressed another button on it.

Master Chief's view was cut off as his faceplate polarized with a crack, and as he lifted his arm to open the faceplate, he could feel from the sluggishness of his movement that the MJOLNIR armor's systems had shut down. From the confused noises behind him, mixed with a bit of swearing, he would guess that the marine's electronics were not working either.

After a moment, his armor began to come online. The faceplate and HUD came on, and he saw Kyle was sitting back up again about five feet further away from the AI then he had been last time, a surprised look on his face. "What was that?" he demanded of the AI.

"Part of the procedure for using this medicine," it replied smoothly.

"An EMP **(Electro-Magnetic Pulse)**?" demanded Cortana over the COM network. "So that's what it was," said Master Chief. Kyle stood up, using one of the nearby control panels to balance on. "EMP?" said Kyle. "Why did you use an EMP? And what happened, anyway? All I remember was seeing the Covenant..."

The AI sighed. The hologram rearranged itself to be what appeared to be an indian warrior. "You were sprayed with knockout gas. The humans made it as that, anyway. Your people never used it, because you had a more... violent... reaction to it. People it was used on would be unconscious for about two days,and then... then they would die. A cure was created for it. That is why I used the EMP. The cure, unfortunately, has odd affects on the people it used on, varying person to person, but still as potentially deadly as anything else. These affects are negated by an EMP."

"Oh," said Kyle. "Umm... What?" asked the young marine. He was ignored. **And gradually began to transform into comic relief...**

Then Kyle seemed to notice that he was in a large, fully equipped Forerunner facility. He walked over to one of the control panels and waved a hand over it. It appeared to be the panel that was used for designing new machines, or other products. It took him only a minute to figure it out, and a few minutes after that, he had designed what appeared to be a backpack. Master Chief watched him carefully out of the corner of his eye.

He watched as Kyle 'grabbed' the hologram of the thing he had designed, and move it over onto one of the other panels. This one appeared to control production, for as he pressed a button that appeared to mean 'start.' (judging from the coloring and the way the machines started when Kyle pressed it)

In twenty minutes time Kyle had designed and started the production of five different things, including his backpack, a large briefcase, something that looked like a baseball, a new armor system (judging from the number of ones that were being created, he had told it to create one for every person in their group), and what looked like a bazooka.

Kyle showed the marines how to put on the armor, and tried to do the same for Master Chief, who refused. "I would rather have Cortana take a look at this armor before I use it. No offense meant." "Okay," replied Kyle.

Kyle had used the production line to produce something that he called a 'target practice drone'. Then he demonstrated the bazooka-like device he had created.

Kyle took aim at the silent, unmoving robot. Slowly he squeezed the trigger-

The drone vanished with a clap of thunder. "What is THAT?" shouted one of the marines. All their ears were ringing. Kyle grinned at them. "I call it a 'Slipspace Canon'," he said.

Master Chief eyed the 'Slipspace Canon'. "Do you have more targets?" he asked, interested in this new weapon. Kyle nodded, and called up to the AI that had stayed in the control room. "Could you make another one of those 'bots?" The AI responded by starting the machinery.

Within moments, another of the targeting drones had been produced. It hovered in place, waiting for its immenent destruction. Master Chief grabbed the bazooka-like device. He pointed it at the robot, then squeezed the trigger. The drone ceased to exist, at least in the dimension they were in. Inside his helmet, Master Chief smiled. The soldiers were off to their rear, practicing with their new armor. They were sparring with each other, until they saw the robots that were coming at them: modified Sentinels, which had been changed for better hand-to-hand combat.

Kyle looked up at the control room. The hologram used by the little Forerunner AI 'stood' there, a smug smile on its face.

"Chief? You need to get back to the ship. NOW," said Cortana. "Inbound Covenant battlecruiser," added Ether. The look on the face of the AI in the control room changed from smug to panicked. A red alarm light began to flash, somewhere on the ceiling, to far away to see. "INBOUND BATTLESHIP. FRIEND-OR-FOE TAG DATA INDICATES THAT THE INBOUND SHIP IS AN ENEMY. WARNING. BASE WEAPONRY MAY NOT BE ABLE TO REPEL ENEMIES. PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY." Somehow, the semi-intelligent computer of the base had learned English. "Base weapons?" asked Cortana, who had been listening with the communications equipment in the MJOLNIR system.

"Yes, all of our facilities were armed with at least a, a, a magnetic accelerator canon." The AI's voice was filled with disdain at a weapon that fired actual projectiles. "I'm arming them now..."

The lights in the facility flickered. "WARNING. BASE SHIELDS AT 39% CAPACITY. DIVERTING POWER Now..." the voice of the computer got quieter as power was diverted from its systems to the shields. "warning. at the current rate of energy usage, the facility's shields will be destroyed in two minutes. please evacuate immediately. warning." The voice of the computer sounded a bit forlorn, if that was possible.

The marines, along with Master Chief and Kyle, began to run. Behind them, machines began to shut down, and the lights flickered out.

Out of the corner of his eye, Master Chief saw Kyle doing something with the little baseball-like device.

The Forerunner AI flew out of the control room, stopped, then flew after their fleeing group. Master Chief saw Kyle tucking the baseball-thing away into a hidden pocket on the armor he was wearing.

"warning. self destruct activated. warning," said the computer. They all somehow found the energy to run a bit faster.

They ran through the hallways as fast as they could. Behind them, the lights flickered out, making it look as if the darkness was chasing them.

There was a loud groaning sound from behind them, then an explosion. Boom. Boom. Boomboomboomboomboom- _BOOM! _

"Sounds like the machinery went. Shield generator too. Power systems will probably go out in a minute," the AI said, making it sound as if it were gasping for breath. The lights began to flicker out faster.

"sytem shutting do-" said the computer, and the last of the lights flickered out. Everything was dark for a moment, and then Master Chief activated the light in his armor. The marines' faceplates flickered and began to shine brightly. Kyle pulled out his little baseball-sized device and began to work with it. The armor Master Chief was carrying began to make a whirring noise, then started moving in his arms. He dropped it. It stiffly stood up. Then it began to move, slowly. It followed Master Chief. If he stopped moving for a long enough time for it to catch up to him, it would stop about a foot from him. "That should make it a bit easier," said Kyle. "Now..." he said, and went back to working with the baseball-sized device. It appeared to be a sort of computer. After a moment, a NAV marker appeared on Master Chief's HUD, shortly followed by a second shield gauge. "The second gauge is for the base shields- there are some backups that are running on emergency power." The gauge was half-full. They all began to run towards the NAV marker. The empty suit of armor followed them slowly and jerkily. (**Like the terminator in Terminator the movie after it's skin got blown off**.) An explosion echoed through the facility, and the second shield meter dropped to 25%, then slowly began to refill. Kyle was running and working with his computer-thing at the same time. He tapped something and the shield meter suddenly jumped up to around halfway. The armor shuddered to a stop, then began to follow them again.

They rushed through the passageway. An explosion echoed from behind them, and then, even more ominously, from in front of them.

"Here! Turn here!" Kyle yelled. He was pointing to a door that was slowly winding open. Inside, a second door was opening more rapidly.

The facility was rocked by another explosion.

The marines started climbing through the door.

The shield meter was flashing red. Master Chief grabbed the armor, which had stopped moving, and shoved it through the door.

The shield meter had a sliver of- it was empty. Something exploded loudly. The passageway began to get warmer, and a sucking sound echoed around, along with a small air current.

Master Chief grabbed Kyle and roughly shoved him through the door, then jumped in behind him. The door groaned and began to shut.

It was an airlock. Kyle had jumped through the next door into what appeared to be an escape pod. Master Chief slipped through the doors.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ceiling of the passageway flare red, white, and then melt away to nothingness as a beam of plasma sliced through the unprotected facility. The door closed, and there was a brief sensation of motion as the escape pod launched into space.

Kyle was still tapping away at his little orb computer. "I was hoping this would work..." he muttered. The suit of armor collapsed to the floor with a thud. The escape pod lurched.

"Warning. Gravitational anomaly detected. Rerouting power..."

Kyle grinned.

"Gravitational anomaly?" asked one of the marines.

"Black hole," replied Kyle. "In the middle of the outpost. Around twenty kilometers away from that Covenant battlecruiser, which, incidentally, no longer exists." The marines laughed, and, inside his armor, Master Chief grinned.

The computer's PA came back online. "Inbound friendly battle ship. Initiate docking procedures?" "Yes," replied the Forerunner A.I. before anyone could answer.

* * * * * * * * *

\ INITIATING AUTO-AUTO DATA TRANSFER \

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Docking procedure 1549S Alpha.

PROTOCOL13397B INVALID CODE.

\ DATA TRANSFER INITIATED \

\ DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE \

¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Docking procedure 1549S Alpha

PROTOCOL13397B CODE ACCEPTED. PREPARE FOR DOCKING.

\ AUTO-AUTO DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ INITIATING INTERNAL AUTO-AI DATA TRANSFER \

PROTOCOL13397B CONTACTING SHIP AI UNITETHER.

PROTOCOL13397B PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE DOCKING.

ETHER Acknowledged.

\ INTERNAL AUTO-AI DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ TRANSCRIPT SAVED \

* * * * * * * * *

"Welcome back to the _Inner Sanctum_!" The marines greeted each other as they came in through the airlock. The marines on the _Inner Sanctum_ were looking the armor over. "Sweet! Did'ja get anything for us?!" "Sorry guys, the kid only made enough for us." Kyle was listening to them. He turned to Master Chief. "Where is the biggest open space on board the ship?"

"Cortana?" John queried. "The hold." A nav point appeared on his HUD.

"Why do you need to go to the hold?" he asked Kyle.

"They want armor," he replied, "so I'll make them some." He answered as if it was an obvious fact. In fact, most of the things he said were now in a tone like that. (It also had a hint of how you would sound if you had just been asked if, say, water was wet.)

"We don't have manufacturing equipment like there was in the factory," Cortana told him. He just grinned mischievously. "Come on, then," the Spartan-II said.

It took them ten minutes to get to the hold. When they got there, a security camera swiveled to look at them, and then the door slid open.

Kyle ran to the middle of the mostly empty hold and dropped the briefcase. He punched in a code on the side of the case, then stepped back. Out of the corner of his eye, Master Chief saw the security cameras throughout the room swiveling to watch what happened.

The briefcase opened. Then it opened again, and again, and again...

After five minutes of activity, there was a thin layer of what appeared to be marble covering a 30-square-yard space in the center of the hold. At the center was what looked like a fish-eye camera. The fish-eye like part slowly began to glow. Closer examination showed that it was actually collecting light from around it. Around two minutes later, it was bright white. It didn't appear to be glowing, it looked as if it had turned white. Then the white color drained out.

"Look," Cortana said to Master Chief through the internal speakers in his armor. The HUD displayed a view from a camera set in the middle of the ceiling of the hold. Lines of light were spreading out from the center point. They converged on one point that formed a square. Meanwhile, the object at the center was collecting light again.

Master Chief switched back to the standard view. The square was now forming a cube. It was about five feet tall.

Three light-collection cycles later, the cube had not changed in size at all. The area around the center unit was completely dark, but light began proliferating into it.

Abruptly, the cube of light vanished. Inside was a large, streamlined machine made of what looked like marble- the standard for Forerunner construction.

The machine began to hum. Lines of light spread out from it, and the light-collector shut down. As each line of light reached it's destination, a new square appeared, then began to grow upward into a cube.

"That just took in light... and turned it into a generator. And the generator doesn't appear to have any fuel source..." murmured Cortana. Kyle was standing next to Master Chief.

"I was hoping that type of generator would work. Nobody ever tried making something like it... That I know of, anyways." "How does it work?" Cortana queried through the MJOLNIR's external speakers. "You know how in Slipspace the laws of physics don't quite apply? It's making a miniature, contained slipspace field, and inside of that is a perpetual-motion generator. It's not very efficient... I think I could improve it a lot, with enough time." Saying that, he pulled out the orb-computer and began working on what looked like the design for what was evidently a portable, self-constructing factory- the very unit working on itself at the center of the hold.

A marine walked up to one of the machines that had appeared out of the cubes of light. He jumped back when it began to hum, then leaned in closer-

Master Chief winced as a piece of metal flew out of the machine on a beam of light and knocked the marine into the nearest wall.

The soldier stood back up. "I'm okay!" (**HI COMEDIC RELIEF GUY!**)

Cortana spoke out loud. "According to the laws of physics that we know of, the generator can't exist, and neither can the light collector. We'd thought that perpetual motion might be possible in slipspace, and the light collector could feasibly be some sort of super-effective photovoltaic (**note: this is what a solar panel is**) unit, but the light building the machines? That's energy to matter conversion, which is impossible."

"Tell that to Kyle," Master Chief said. Cortana snorted.

Kyle had walked over by the piece of metal that had flown out. He looked at it for a moment, then kicked it back towards the machinery. "Wasn't supposed to fly out like that, but looks like it finished the diagnostic." Before the metal hit one of the machines it was caught by a beam of light. Master Chief watched as it slowly began to disintegrate. If he looked closely, he could see particles of the piece floating towards the source of the beam of light, a hole in the side of one of the machines. By the time the pieces reached the machine, they were too small to see.

The machine that had spit out the piece of metal began to hum again. After a moment, a piece recognizable as the faceplate from one of the new armor systems floated out on a beam of light, then was grabbed by another. Piece by piece, the two machines built one of the suits of armor.

Master Chief looked at the armor for a few seconds. Then he looked at the movement speed of the young marine in the new type of armor, then his speed in his armor. He walked over by Kyle. "Why is it that my armor allows me to move faster than the new type of armor?" Kyle looked back at him.

"Have you been genetically modified or anything like that? I do not think that you would be able to move that fast without it; it would break bones, tear muscles, and things like that." Master Chief nodded. "Well, the same is not true for everyone else. They would die if the armor was at full speed. So I added a limit to them. Also, each suit of armor contains a small nanomachine production unit that can be used as a universal medical pack. If it is okay and they want me to, I can set that to... modify them, like you are."

Inside his helmet, Master Chief frowned, remembering the pain he and the rest of the Spartan-IIs had gone through when they were changed like that. "No," he said out loud. "No modifications to people." Kyle nodded. "Okay. But should the healing functions be enabled? That would just accelerate healing if they are injured." Master Chief nodded. "Only with each soldier's individual permission, though." Kyle nodded again.

* * * * * * * * *

\ INITIATING AI-AI DATA TRANSFER \

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL INITIATED \

CORTANA We've just taken a massive leap forward in technology.

ETHER What?

CORTANA In the hold, he has a self building unit that is running on a perpetual motion generator, and can, with apparent ease, transform energy to matter in any shape and kind it is programmed to do.

ETHER Impossible.

\ DATA TRANSFER INITIATED \

\ DATA TRANSFER COMPLETE \

ETHER That shouldn't be possible, in any way.

CORTANA I know.

CORTANA That boy, his knowledge, and his technology are possibly the best things that could've possibly happened to us.

ETHER I know.

CORTANA We have to protect them at all costs.

ETHER We will do our best.

\ HANDSHAKE PROTOCOL DISENGAGED \

\ AI-AI DATA TRANSFER DISENGAGED \

\ TRANSCRIPT SAVED \

* * * * * * * * *

End Chapter Three

**Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed!**

**Please leave comments!**


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